Action Front eBook

“Here, you shut up, Bunthrop,” he shouted.
“Keep down in the trench. You’re
wounded, aren’t you? Well, you’ll
get back presently.”

“That be damn,” said Bunthrop. “You
don’t understand. They’re runnin’
away, but we can’t go out after ’em if
these silly blighters here keep shootin’.
Come on now, or they’ll all be gone.”
And Private Bunthrop, the despised “conscript,”
slung his bayoneted rifle over his wounded shoulder
and commenced to scramble up out over the front of
the broken parapet. And what is more he was really
and genuinely annoyed when the sergeant catching him
by the heel dragged him down again and ordered him
to stay there.

“Don’t you understand?” he stuttered
excitedly, and gesticulating fiercely towards the
front. “They’re runnin’, I tell
you; the blighters are runnin’ away. Why
can’t we get out after ’em?”

SMASHING THE COUNTER-ATTACK

" ... a violent counter-attack was delivered but
was successfully repulsed at every point with heavy
losses to the enemy.”—­EXTRACT
FROM OFFICIAL DESPATCH.

There appears to be some doubt as to who rightly claims
to have been the first to notice and report signs
of the massing of heavy forces of Germans for the
counter-attack on our positions. The infantry
say that a scouting patrol fumbling about in the darkness
in front of the forward fire trench heard suspicious
sounds—­little clickings of equipment and
accouterments, stealthy rustlings, distant tramping—­and
reported on their return to the trench. An artillery
observing officer is said to have seen flitting shadows
of figures in the gray light of the dawn mists, and,
later, an odd glimpse of cautious movement amongst
the trees of a wood some little distance behind the
German lines, and an unbroken passing of gray-covered
heads behind a portion of a communication trench parapet.
He also reported, and he may have been responsible
for the dozen or so of shrapnel that were flung tentatively
into and over the wood. An airman droning high
over the lines, with fleecy white puffs of shrapnel
smoke breaking about him, also saw and reported clearly
“large force of Germans massing Map Square So-and-so.”

But whoever was responsible for the first report matters
little. The great point is that the movement
was detected in good time, apparently before the preparations
for attack were complete, so that the final arraying
and disposal of the force for the launching of the
attack was hampered and checked, and made perforce
under a demoralizing artillery fire.